Chimp Research:
The End in Sight?

The good news is that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has
accepted the recommendations of an expert panel to cut way back on using
chimpanzees in medical research.

Not so good is that they’re still leaving the door open.

The NIH has suspended all new grants for biomedical and behavioral research
on chimpanzees and has set new guidelines requiring that the research be
necessary for human health, and that there be no other way to accomplish it.

The report from panel of experts said use of chimpanzees in
government-funded medical research should be reserved only for studies where
no suitable alternative is available or where testing on humans would be
unethical, and only for life-threatening or debilitating conditions.

The move will give a boost to the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act
of 2011, which both houses of Congress are considering. It will also boost
consideration of a petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for
captive chimps to be declared endangered, as wild chimpanzees are. Once this
exemption on captive chimps is removed, they cannot be used in research –
nor in entertainment and as pets. Being “endangered” stops all of that.

Research use of animals that are so closely related to humans should not
proceed unless it offers insights not possible with other animal models and
unless it is of sufficient scientific or health value to offset the moral
costs. We found very few cases that satisfy these criteria.

The downside

The report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) was requested by Congress,
which is considering legislation to ban research on chimps altogether. But
the report doesn’t call for a complete ban. Instead, it gets into the usual
ethical muddle of recognizing, on the one hand, that chimpanzees are so
close to humans that it’s morally wrong to experiment on them, while
arguing, on the other hand, that chimps are so close to humans that we still
need to experiment on them.

So on one page it says:

The committee felt ethics was at the core of any discussion about the
necessity of continued use of chimpanzees in research.

But on another it concludes that:

Most current use of chimpanzees for biomedical research is unnecessary based
on the criteria established by the committee, except for two potential
current research uses

And the panel couldn’t agree on

how much the chimpanzee model would accelerate or improve prophylactic HCV
vaccine development.

Ultimately, in other words, it’s not really about the fundamental ethics of
using chimps in research; it’s about deciding when it might be unethical not
to use them when the question is what’s best for humans.

A group of scientists probes this ethical quagmire at the Kennedy Institute
of Ethics:

[The report] never presents a moral justification for conducting research on
chimpanzees other than the necessity of their use in order to advance our
scientific understanding and to potentially provide benefits to public
health. Only human interests play a role in this justification … and, yet,
as this Committee correctly notes, the problem of harms to chimpanzees and
their moral status is what gave rise to the controversy to which this report
is responding.

The report repeatedly states how close chimpanzees are to humans in
anatomical structure, in cognitive structure, and even in moral capacity to
act altruistically. Given that a chimpanzee is as close to a human being as
this report correctly indicates a chimpanzee is, it is hard to understand
why the same level of protections should not be provided to chimpanzees as
are provided to humans … The report never addresses this central issue.

You can read the report from the IOM here. It includes links to an easy to
read slide presentation.

And the response from the group at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics is here.

Our take on it all: An important step forward, but until chimps are given
the specific legal right to live their lives free of human exploitation, the
status quo still ultimately prevails.

Incidentally, the European Union banned the use of chimpanzees in invasive
research last year, leaving just the United States and Gabon as the only
countries in the world that conduct these experiments.

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